arXiv:2606. 03648v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adapting foundation large language models to a user's task or preferred style through fine-tuning can result in compromising the model's safety.
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The paper investigates whether existing AI safety benchmarks, designed for large language models, are suitable for evaluating small language models (SLMs). By testing five benchmark suites on 26 open‑source SLMs with a unified scoring rubric, the authors find that ambiguous judgments dominate, especially for complex prompts and certain architectures. This ambiguity, linked to factors like lexical density and output perplexity, undermines the reliability of aggregate leaderboards and reveals a confound between model capability and perceived safety.
The paper introduces a chance-constrained approach to fine‑tune large language models (LLMs) that limits the proportion of safety examples whose performance degrades beyond a set threshold relative to a reference model. By replacing the discontinuous violation indicator with a differentiable majorization, the authors derive a tractable, conservative constraint and a closed‑form, constraint‑aware gradient update that focuses on examples near or above the degradation threshold. Experiments on harmful fine‑tuning across three tasks and models show that this tail‑aware method consistently outperforms existing safety‑preserving baselines, suggesting that safety preservation should be treated as a reliability‑constrained optimization problem rather than average‑risk regularization.
arXiv:2608. 11705v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aligned large language models (LLMs) are expected to exhibit safety behavior based on the content of the user request: they should refuse unsafe requests and comply with safe ones.
arXiv:2606. 28843v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning a large language model is a ubiquitous method for enhancing its capability on a specific downstream task.
arXiv:2506. 08473v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) improves performance but introduces critical safety vulnerabilities: even minimal harmful data can severely compromise safety measures.
arXiv:2607. 09697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing safety mechanisms for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face a fundamental trade-off between safety and utility.